Seth Andrews

On 19 September 1997 the Christian songwriter Rich Mullins was killed in a car crash, and the morning host of a Christian radio station in Tulsa had to tell his listeners. Seth Andrews spoke words of comfort on the air. Privately, he later wrote, he could not square a God who counts every sparrow with so pointless and gruesome a death. He called it the first real seed of doubt.¹²³ Eleven years later he told his parents he was an atheist, and by his own count his atheist podcast was downloaded more than 310,000 times in November 2012.⁴⁵⁶

This chapter asks how a man whose job was to speak for faith every morning came to speak against it, and why it took him so long.

A literal Bible

He was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1968, one of six children of devout parents who lived and taught a literal Bible. His father came from a conservative Lutheran background and leaned Baptist; his mother was Pentecostal, down to speaking in tongues. There was constant talk about religion in the house, he remembered, but never questions or doubts.⁷⁸⁹ The family did not go to church regularly; instead they watched the Sunday television preachers, and his parents corrected the ones they thought were wrong.¹⁰

After third grade he told his parents what he had learned at school about Neanderthal man, and they took him out of public school. From then on he went to Christian schools, Temple Christian in Broken Arrow and Eastwood Baptist in Tulsa, where scripture was taught as fact beside history, mathematics and science.¹¹¹² Doubt, he was taught, was a sin, or the whisper of Satan; and his own doubt, he says, did not begin until he was an adult.¹³ On his timeline, that is his faith. He was, in his own word, a true believer.¹⁴

Morning radio

In 1990 he applied for an announcer's job at KXOJ, a Christian station in Tulsa. He rose from part-time work to the morning show and stayed about ten years, because he loved the music and wanted to help Christ reach people.¹⁵ Looking back in 2025, he wrote that the radio years took him back to a time when Jesus was still Lord and he had not yet properly read his own Bible.¹⁶¹⁷

Mullins's death in 1997 was the first shock. The second was 11 September 2001. He heard preachers say that the attacks were God chastising a nation, and he heard what he called empty god-talk; looking at the death and the wreckage, he said, he could not see God anywhere.¹⁸¹⁹ For the next few years his faith went quiet. He still spoke the language of Christianity, but he stopped going to church and stopped praying, put his questions into what he called mental storage, and told himself that God was surely real and moved on.²⁰²¹

By then he had left Christian radio, around 2000, for Clear Channel's secular stations in Tulsa; accounts differ on whether he left or lost the job.²² Working as a broadcaster and producer for churches, he saw sermons that contradicted each other, pastors forced out, congregations paying for promised blessings, and churches run as marketing machines. Human beings, he concluded, were doing all the work; God was not their co-pilot, or even in the vehicle.²³²⁴

Hitchens on a screen

In the middle of the 2000s he came across a YouTube video of Christopher Hitchens and sat glued to the screen as Hitchens attacked the God he had been trained never to question. A reviewer of his memoir dates it to 2004 and names the debate; Andrews gives no year, and accounts differ.²⁵²⁶ It gave him the nerve to ask his own questions. For the first time, he said, he read the Bible objectively and without a filter.²⁵²⁷ He took his questions to the experts in his own circle, and their answers drove him further away: that science was a tool of Satan, that the arithmetic proved the animals fitted in Noah's ark, and finally that Christianity was true because someone had once had a personal experience.²⁸²⁹³⁰ At thirty-seven, he told a reporter in 2014, his doubts reached critical mass, and for the first time he examined what he had held to be true.¹⁴³¹ It took him years more to find the courage, and for a few years he still feared hell.³² The timeline places his doubt where he does, in his late thirties, and not at Mullins's death or at 9/11, because those shocks, he says, went into storage while he went on talking like a believer.²⁰

After an arduous year, he said in 2020, he realised he had been living a belief system he had inherited, and that the Bible could not be sustained scientifically, historically or morally.³³³⁴

"Atheist"

He sent his parents emails full of questions, and he did not say the word "atheist" to them until late 2008, though he thinks they saw the train coming. They were heartbroken, and, he said in 2013, still were; it strained the family for years.⁴³⁵³⁶ He understood, he wrote, how hard it must be for parents who had spent so much to protect a beloved child from hell.³⁷ On the timeline, this is his declaration.

Alone with his unbelief in Oklahoma, he built a website called The Thinking Atheist, then short videos, then a podcast, to make the way out of superstition easier for people like himself.⁵ In 2012 he self-published a memoir, Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason.³⁸ In the winter of 2013 he toured it, from a pub in Tulsa to the University of Central Oklahoma and the University of Tulsa, and on to the American Atheists convention in Austin.³⁹ A reporter quoted him wondering how he had got there: just over a decade before, he had been a religious broadcaster, and now he was on stage challenging the God he used to champion.³⁹⁴⁰

In March 2014 he set out on the "Unholy Trinity" tour with the atheist speakers Matt Dillahunty and AronRa.⁴¹ That February in Flagstaff he had given the line he has kept: he was not an enemy of religious people, but he was an enemy of religion.⁴²⁴³ He reminds other atheists that religious people are not stupid; he himself, he says, believed for thirty years that a donkey could talk.⁴⁴⁴⁵⁴⁶ If Jesus proves himself tomorrow, he has said, he will apologise in public and work for Christ, but he is not holding his breath.⁴⁴⁴⁷

The other side

No believer's published reply to him was found for this chapter. The believers in his story are the ones he describes: the parents who grieved, the apologists whose answers drove him off, and a conference leader who once advised the faithful to blink away their doubts, because blinking interrupts a thought that conflicts with God's word.³⁷⁴⁸ He tells their side with more sympathy than scorn. A friendly reviewer noted that in his later books he sometimes could not keep from mocking beliefs he thought absurd.⁴⁹

Widening

After the 2016 election his podcast turned to politics, church and state, and Christian nationalism. In his youth, he said, he had linked God and country himself; once he left the bubble, his views on abortion, the death penalty, gay rights and the poor fell one after another, like dominoes.³³⁵⁰⁵¹ He wrote more books: Sacred Cows (2015), Confessions of a Former Fox News Christian (2020) and Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot (2022).⁵² In 2025 he recorded a podcast about his Christian-radio years, and wrote that for all his old embrace of superstition, the experience had made him a better-informed, and more compassionate, apostate.¹⁶¹⁷ His revision on the timeline is not a step back toward belief but a widening, and a gentler look at the man he was.

Did his unbelief change shape?

His unbelief took a long time to arrive and has not moved since. A boy raised on a literal Bible became a man who spoke for God on the radio every morning, kept his first doubts in storage for nearly a decade, and only in his late thirties let them out. Once he had said the word, he spent his working life saying it. What has changed is its reach, from God to politics, and its tone toward the believer he used to be.

Matt Dillahunty, another believer who studied his way out of faith, and who toured with Andrews in 2014, has his own chapter in this book.